


Five Times the Boy Died

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Original Work
Genre: Child Death, Gen, Mentioned Cannibalism, Synthetic Humanoids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-29
Updated: 2018-11-28
Packaged: 2019-09-02 02:46:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16778080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: Survival sometimes depends on tiny differences. If a few little things had gone differently, who knows what the world would look like.





	1. Chapter 1

There is absolutely nothing special about the noise of the train. A standard, low, throbbing hum, the same as any mag-lev rail-system.

In a way, the sound reminds Darrel of home. The hum of machinery from the lab. Where he should be, instead of in this place.

This information strikes him as slightly off. Doubled in a way, or somehow split. Home doesn’t include labs, though his father was Johannes Whithall, a genetic engineer of some renown, who worked with many labs around the country. Darrel had visited the labs, sure, but they weren’t _home_.

Except home is just as much the lab. Darrel as he is was grown in those labs as much as Darrel-that-once-was was raised in a nice up-strat home. Darrel took his Imprinting more effectively than most high-end Synthetics did, an ability that his father/creator had praised him for despite its being out of his control.

He is a very small Synthetic and he blends well into Organic society with an efficiency that is illegal, though he has no idea of this fact. He is also not aware of the fact that he is what could be considered ‘stolen intellectual property’, as he is a completed Synthetic that has been adapted for a purpose other than what he was grown for. His Imprinting did not cover these ideas, and his creator has not deigned to explain them to him.

What he _is_ aware of is the fact that his heart is starting to beat harder, his guts tightening in anxiety. There is nothing special about the noise of the train, but it begins to become more prominent. As he was told to avoid contact with other people as much as possible, he has no car-mates, and so there is no one to look to to know if he should be alarmed. One bright fluorescent light flickers, darkens, and then steadies. The hum, ever-there, changes not in pitch or volume.

It is calm. He is calm. He draws his knees together and rests the slim little case he carries with him across his lap. In it is a sketch pad and a small notebook that tells him about various true-thread and mutie variations of Geometridae found in the area he’ll be staying with his creator/father when the train reaches its destination. These are important things to have, very nearly more important than the bag full of neatly folded clean clothes in the much larger case on the overhead shelf.

The light flickers again. The hum doesn’t waver. If anything, it’s stronger, steadier than before. Darrel’s anxiety grows. He wishes very suddenly that he were back home, even back in his tank, where it was quiet and safe.

Were he not afraid of somehow losing a pencil, Darrel would love to pull out his notebook and draw something. Something fiercely logical and just slightly petulant berates the thought as stupid; there’s no point in drawing anything. Drawing won’t change anything.

The lights go out. More terrifying, that steady, important hum, is suddenly a shriek. Darrel’s anxiety becomes terror. He barely has the time to acknowledge the difference, there there is a clinical part of his mind, something distant and disconnected, that is _very_ interested in the nuance of emotion.

He is jerked to the side, landing in the aisle at the same time as his suitcase flies off the overhead rack and crashes to the floor, contents spilling messily. This offends Darrel, who spent hours carefully packing. Offense strikes him more deeply than the pain of his smaller case digging into his ribs, though the pain is persistent and he can already feel bruises blooming where the corners bite against his flesh.

Fighting his way to his feet – the train is still moving but now the inertia feels random and jerked, nauseating – he storms over to his suitcase, intent on putting the clothing back together, and the world shifts. He is thrown back into the seats, bowled into the wall. His mouth suddenly tastes of blood and he _knows_ with an indignant sort of certainty that he’s got a bloody nose. His knees hurt from being knocked to the floor and he’s certain he’s scrapped them. Perhaps bloodied them, as well.

There is an ungodly screech. The hum has ceased and the movement of the car, so fast and jarring, feels sure and pointed. It’s impossible to think that one of the mag-lev trains could be taken off it’s rails; mag-levs are safe as houses, safe as anything, and so Darrel doesn’t bother lending a thought to that, even when the car hits something, hard, sending him slamming hard to the floor again.

It’s not the floor though. The room thinks it’s the floor because that’s now gravity is suddenly set up, but this is the wall. The ceiling and floor are suddenly not where they belong, and the long narrow car sits for a moment at an ugly, steep angle.

Only for a moment. Something hits the car again – another car as truth would have it, but that’s _impossible_ – and Darrel is crushed by chairs ripped from their bases, his face crashed against a window, temple hitting the glass hard enough that he looses consciousness.

The crash, the first of its kind, will kill three hundred people, almost everyone on board. Most of them die in the explosion of the engine or the fire that follows, but Darrel dies cold and alone, unconscious and unaware of the broken ribs piercing his lung, drowning him.


	2. Chapter 2

Tanks were cataloged and tracked and managed with all the bureaucratic thoroughness possible, right from the very beginning. Too many chances for one company to try getting the one up on another through theft, too much room for the government itself to get slapped with civil suits for improper appropriation of property.

No, everything had its neat, tidy little filing system.

And as with any micro-managed system, certain things had a way of falling into the cracks.

A big project suddenly falls to the wayside in light of a new discovery. Somehow the ‘big project’ falls to 'side project’ and then to 'personal pet project’. Equipment is 'borrowed with the long term in mind’. When the cost of keeping power to a personal project becomes too high, well, there’s so much 'borrowed’ matter in the project, it would be a shame to flush the Synth and scrap the tank so early on.

Somehow, the tank is moved. Somehow, that relocation is approved by just enough of the right people that it’s technically not illegal.

Everyone else is busy. They all have their own concerns, after all. If one were keen enough to keep updates mundane, give no sign of enthusiasm or even hope for success, people eventually stopped wondering about that odd little side project. A boring burden has been removed from the groups concern.

But no thief is immortal. No human at all is. That’s why they created the Synthetics; people who theoretically _could_ be perfected into immortality and efficiency… or maybe that’s why _some_ were attracted to the idea of the projects. Most of the actual labs seem to be about creating cheap, disposable labor or soldiers that can’t ask questions.

Darrel, could be, would be different. He just has to be finished.

It’s much slower going for a single scientist with no aides or assistants. The rapid growth has to be slowed down so that no aberrant mutations can sprout while attention is elsewhere. The trans-Salve feeding has to be slowed too, so enough tank-grade stuff to replenish the system can somehow be procured and loaded into the machine. Cleaning the machine each week is a full-day chore in an of itself, and the project is a lonely, big secret.

And Johannes is old now.

The Synthetic in the tank is under-formed and smallish, but some of that is as per the original design. He knows nothing but his Imprinting, which is as yet only three-quarters of the way finished priming. The doctor had to rewrite some of it to include some of the particulars of Darrel’s character.

In a way, he knew from the outset that he would never see the Synth out of the tank. No one would; no one would ever find and finish him. Johannes is an old man and very tired, and the loss of his son has been more painful thank he would want to admit.

When he dies, in essence, so does the boy floating in the tank.

For a few months, maybe a full year if a way can be found to ration and cycle the Salve and the machinery can be installed in a cool, dry place, the tank will continue its slow, churning process. The little Synthetic – better not to think of him as Darrel, _Gott im Himmel,_ that hurts more than anything – will drain the nutrients from the Salve in his tank and starve, or the tank itself will over heat or malfunction in some other way and shut down.

With no one to power the tank on or decode its system and open its thick glass tube, the boy inside will be left to decompose in the pseudo-organic matter he’d grown in, never aware of anything but the dream of Imprinting and the foggy voice of a man he might have called Pa.


	3. Chapter 3

Stray tanks weren’t unheard of.

Rare, but certainly not unheard of.

A company dissolved, a scientist turned crook lost his balls and tried to stash the goods, hell, things just fell through the cracks some times. Something special, a glint of gold in the dreck.

When one was found though, you had to act fast. There were other rats scurrying the down-strats, and that’s inevitably where lost gold like that wound up. They were all scavengers down this low; you had to get there first and stake out, or else someone else got to the meat first.

Getting the tanks open was the hard part, if it was worth it to do so.

Half the time whatever unlucky sonuvvabitch in the tube was slime, or brain dead. If the tank wasn’t hooked to power and the glass was fogged, it was best just to send the whole thing to BlackScrap. They’d dispose of the contents of the tank and pay a disgusting amount for the privilege. ‘Researchers’ they called themselves. They re-purposed the tanks, too, god knew what for.

This tank, by any measure, wasn’t fogged. Someone had either managed to secure power for it for however long it had been in here, or else had hooked it up before the body inside – looked to be a kid-type build – could starve or mutate beyond recognition. Who knew about its cognitive function for sure, whatever the tank’s flashing lights were saying.

Working fast, he punched a few of the buttons, grinning briefly to himself when the sequence awarded a decompressing hiss and the rush of running, watered down Salve. Without someone to change the feeding program and reload the tank, the kid inside had nearly worked through all the food, turning his environment from something viscous and almost gel-like to this watery birth-fluid.

It was tepid running over his shoes, and he shifted in distaste, catching the little body as the boy came free of the machine.

“Hey there, l'il friend,” he said, helping the kid turn his head to cough the liquid from his lungs. He was stick thin already, though most kids coming out of tanks looked underfed as it was. Tanks were all set up for adult body-fat percentages, one of those variables that it wasn’t worth the trouble for humes to change. “They teach you how t’ talk in there?”

The kid blinked at him in the dim warehouse light, looking frail and blinded. “Yes,” he finally said. “Where are the humans?”

He laughed quietly, standing and digging a shirt out of the kit bag he’d brought, handing it to the kid and gesturing for him to put it on. “There ain’t any humes here.”

“There are supposed to be humans.” The Kid sounded unsure and almost petulant. It was the worst kind of obnoxious. That kind always went out looking for the humes they were supposed to have and ended up dragging a whole gang out into the cop’s attention, get the people who saved them from their tank branded as thieves and locked up or euthanized. “I need to go to them.”

“Yeah, keep yer shirt on kid,” he said, running a hand back over his head as he thought quickly. If he was fast, he should be able to send a runner to BlackScrap to take the tank and get the cash for it. Someone might try to swoop in on the empty machine, but it was better to get out of here now.

The Menageries were always looking for new contracts and they paid head hunters a fair price. There were definitely some that would love a little young model like this kid, red hair and all, especially after he put some weight on…

but he’d talk. Someone would eventually hear.

“Are you stealing me?”

“Nah, kid,” he said, smiling. The expression made his tattooed face a jack-o-lantern grin, too wide but goofy, not threatening. “I’m gonna take you where you go.”

The meat market was infinitely safer in the end. And word was, Mari’s gave free samples of the good meat when you brought your own catch in.


	4. Chapter 4

The cops bore no love for Synthetics.

Creatures that were supposed to make the world work so much more simply had just increased the population they were sworn to keep watch over, and protecting some tube-grown animal from pissed off drunks wasn’t exactly the glamour that any of them had signed up for.

In the years since the first wave of Synthetics appeared on the market, the job of policing the roughest areas of town soon became the starting ground for those hoping to get out of their own birth-strat by scaling the system to the top, strat-climbing humes who’d do anything to show they were worth promotion. Those who weren’t signing up to get out were in it for more basic sadistic pleasures, especially after the Carlton Murder Trail and the fallout of the Synths being assigned rights.

Any Synthetic worth their pulse knew not to cross a cop. Most free Synths had developed a sort of nose for the cops, when they’d be around and when it was safe to be a little rowdier than normal. But in the down-strats around the Carlton Clinic, they all showed a little respect. To many prominent members of various gangs owed Shi their skins for the local Golems to add unnecessarily to his stress.

The police, however, owed him nothing. Except, maybe, by their measure, some trouble.

Every one knew Shi ran some shady business on the side. He pretty much structured the medical end of the black market, until BlackScrap stepped in and it started running itself. Everyone _knew_ but no one _said_ , and it worked out. You needed a bullet pulled out or a knife wound closed, Shi was your guy. He also helped out with various ailments associated with living in the smog or working the obscene hours contracted Synths did with little sleep. All on the books and legit.

If you needed a new face or to unload a few extra organs (or get some replaced), Shi was still your guy. He was better than any scag in the strats, and he was discrete. He had to do the shady shit, the late night organ trades and the Salve sales to drug refiners, to keep the clinic open.

Why he bothered was anyone’s guess.

The fact that he bothered _and_ managed to keep evading the law pissed off the local police, a grudge that had passed down from hume generation to generation.

Owe him their lives or not, when the cops made their irregular sweeps of the neighborhood, the local Synthetics weren’t likely to step in to try and help Shi. And what would it matter if they did; just a couple more Golems to haul in to the station. And most of them didn’t have the political fame or hume connections that Shi did, making it so that anything done too hastily on the local PD’s end would attract all kinds of the wrong attention.

The kids were less protected. Gage knew the drill.

Quiet as Dowel was, everyone in the clinic really just thought he’d slip notice.

No one expected him to cry out when he was pulled from around the desk, pushed against the wall and frisked – and _no one_ expected him to call out for his Pa. Just the word caught them all of guard, the cops and the few patients who hadn’t managed to scatter, and even Shi.

Gage had just never thought the boy could be such a fool.

“Breedin’ em yerself now, Carlton?” one red-faced cop asked, a grin splitting his face. “You know we got laws against that?”

Technically there were no laws, but if a golem not designed to breed managed to do so Gage was willing to bet new laws would be drawn up.

“He ain’ – y’ know damn well it’s jes how he calls me,” the doctor said, and then grunted as the hume struck him, snarling something about respect. Shi snarls something back and he’s trying to keep attention off Dowel, Gage knows that, but then someone winds up one of those damn souped up prods and jams it against Shi’s neck, sending him to the floor, and Dowel _screams._

Shi’s up on his knees when they knock Dowel to the floor, one cop pulling his hair back. It seems to Gage, still pinned at the far wall over by the storage closet, that the cops have given up trashing the clinic under the pretense of searching the place. No, they all want to be part of the show.

The cop who’s got Dowel by the hair jerks his head back, Dowel begging him to let go. “Don’t you see th’ fambly resemblance, Sarge?”

“He’s n-”

Shi’s struck again, hard, and Dowel sobs. If this were a fair fight, a bar brawl maybe, Gage has no doubt that the doctor could break free and knock them all silly. But they’re cops and they have The Law on their side, and Shi is just another Golem. One who’s made trouble in the past.

“Issat yer daddy,” the ring-leader cop says, grabbing Dowel by the face and pointing at Shi. Dowel whined, whimpering as he tried to pull away, but the cop wouldn’t let up. “y'called him yer daddy, issat yer _daddy,_ y’ fuckin’ retard?”

“Tell ‘im no,” Shi ordered, fighting against the hands that held him. He was kneeling on the floor facing Dowel, the cops in a circle around them. It was hard for Gage to see anything, short as he was, but he could _hear_ just fine. Hear the smack of something cracking hard against Shi’s face again, Dowel sobbing an elongated noise of negation before someone’s booted foot connected with the boy’s chest or stomach.

“Don’t fuckin’ lie t’ me,” the cop screamed, kicking at Dowel again. The kid stayed down, just like Shi would have told him too, but the damage was done. The cops smelled blood and now they wanted the meat; the Sargent set to kicking and beating the kid in earnest, shouting mangled versions of his question –

“issat scum yer daddy? That cock suckin’ bastard yer _pa_?”

– as Gage was held back against the wall and Shi was held to the floor. The cops with nothing better to do seemed set to egg their leader on, and it all seemed to go on forever. Gage didn’t even realize he was weeping from his good eye until his breath caught in his throat and he choked quietly, doing his best to swallow the sound.

After what felt like forever, the fever seemed to lift from the humes. Their Sargent stepped back, sniffing back and exhaling a sigh like he’d just run a marathon, and then spun hard on his heel and kicked Shi, sharp as a slap across his face.

“Well boys, I didn’t find nothin’ here but some a shitty treatment f'cility, how 'bout you?”

No one, it seemed, had. Shi was roughly let loose and the cops laughed as he scrambled across the floor, not even bothering to stand, to get to the crumpled form of the boy.

“Yeah, one a yer patients sher seems to be in a shitty state. You oughta get to that. See how well yer magic hands work today.”

The humes filed out, letting Gage free as well. It was clear enough from the way Shi remain curled on the floor how likely they were to recover from this in any real way. Gage felt a sick, bitter bubble of bile rise in his throat at the idea of approaching the other two, sobbing openly at last when he tried to breathe.

In the end, Shi lifted Dowel very carefully into his arms, carrying the bloodied, miserable boy into the closest exam room. The kid’s face was so swollen and bruised that it was hard to see any sign of that young face; pouty lips split and sulky eyes blackened and swollen shut. His teeth had been broken and every breath was wet agony. But, though no one asked him to stay, Gage remained on hand, watching Shi lay the boy on the table and bend to kiss his forehead, smoothing a hand back carefully over his head.

But Dowel’s chest wasn’t lifting, and the diagnostic table made no more fuss over him than it would have if they’d set a box of tools on it. Somewhere in there, Gage had already missed that fabled flight of the soul.

The boy was gone, leaving Shi and Gage alarmingly alone in the clinic again.


	5. Chapter 5

He’d had nightmares that she’d come back.

Her cozening voice and her prying claws had haunted his dreams, making him toss and turn where he should have been in still peace, his little heart racing where it should have slowed for the night. She’d wanted him for his eyes but his eyes weren’t enough and she would have taken everything, his life to extend hers, when he’d only just begun.

The terror of her isn’t quite that refined, at least not consciously. But he caught himself checking the dark corners of his room sometimes with the light of his phone, wondering if she couldn’t somehow slip in…

It hadn’t mattered much that Shi had promised that she was gone. It wasn’t so much that he thought Shi was lying to him or even that the older Synth was wrong, but more that it seemed to simple, too _nice_ for that awful thing to be so quickly finished with.

She catches him when he’s out running a package for Shi. She’d been horrible looking before, when he hadn’t known anything and Shi had turned him over to her without too much question. That had been scary, though then she’d crooned and fussed over him, called him a sweetling as she swept him away into the darkness. He’d known nothing of the world or the terrors it held, and her ugliness hadn’t meant much to him – the Imprinting didn’t tell him to be frightened of her, and so he hadn’t been.

And she’d seemed nice, that was the strange thing. Gentle in a wheedling way he hadn’t understood.

This time she calls him nothing, her breath coming in harsh ugly gasps as he struggles against her claws. He fights this time, where before he went willingly. First he fights like Shi taught him, screaming for help and trying to hit her where, clinically speaking, it should hurt. Then he fights like Mister Tony taught him, dirty as some would call it, turning trimmed nails to claws and writhing out of her cloying embrace every time she gets fresh hold of him.

No matter what he does, she keeps coming. He can’t seem to get enough air in to keep trying to call for help, and so he gives that up, saving energy to keep thrashing. When his shirt tears and her filthy talons bury into his back, he can hear it with nauseating clarity. He cries out, twisting in her grip like a fish on a hook, and she laughs in his ear, grotesque face hovering over his shoulder.

When she slams him to the ground, it’s like being driven there by a truck, slammed to the pavement and crushed so hard his head bounces and his ears ring.

Any moment now, any moment, Shi will find him. Shi always finds him, he’s always there to save him, Shi’s strong and tough and even if he’s mean sometimes, he always, _always_ makes sure Dowel will be safe.

“You’re _fatter_ than I remember,” she snarls in his ear, twisting her nails in his back. He sobs, disgusted by her touch when she moves, bringing both hands to the sides of his face. He shudders when he realizes that the sticky warmth on her fingers is his own blood. She traces her claws gently on the soft skin under his eyes and he’s terrified, too terrified to move now, with those filthy nails so close to his eyes.

He shuts them instead, his breath wavering like he’s close to tears. “Pa’s gonna kill you,” he informs her. “Kill you for real this time.”

The hideous, false-Chimera laughs at him, nails digging in and palms pressing hard against his temples. “He’s never gonna know where you went,” she hisses. “ _You’re_ gonna die and I’m gonna get your eyes, and I win, I win, I win.”

When she laughs, she sounds like a crow, a big fat ugly crow, and he says so.

It’s odd, it really is. He can hear the sudden snap as his head is twisted sharply to one side and his vision blacks out, but instead of pain all he feels is a sort of irritable tingling, and he hates it.

It tingles and burns and he hates it.

Luckily, it doesn’t last very long at all.


	6. And One Time He Didn't

The theory has been posited that every possible choice made creates a split in the world, or a web of worlds perhaps, where the same people live the same lives based on the outcomes of those choices. Flip a coin in one world and create two new worlds, one for each outcome of the toss.

Every choice is important, every life consequential.

Throw the cards up in the air and create infinity in the outcome of how they will fall.

There is a boy, smallish and well-formed. He is a Synthetic who would blend alarmingly well into Organic society were it not for the tattoos giving him away. He enjoys the creep of inch-worms and keeping his clothes neat, and he has no idea that he was originally intended to serve as a spying Chimera.

Many times he has thrown the cards.

Often, he doesn’t know he’s done it. From the moment he was seeded in the glass womb of his Tank, he’s had so many chances to fail. His choices and those of the others he interacts with are all he has to shield him from predatory Fate.

Any different move would shift where he stands today. A million worlds exist where he no longer walks the world.

Here, however, he wakes early. Pa puts breakfast on the table promptly at five, and the choice is very clear: sleep in or eat. Dowel prefers not to go hungry, especially on days when he’ll be asked to go outside, out into the dangerous wide world to run deliveries and messages Pa can’t send over the net.

Dragging on his socks, he sits on the edge of his bed for a moment, head fogged still with sleep and the snare of a tangle of messy dreams, none pleasant but all equally dissipated and impossible to grab. Darkness, but not a safe kind.

Death, perhaps.

It waits for everyone, and Pa has taught him that everything in the world is thus dangerous. He hates the notion. It’s awful grim, and not a very fun outlook.

Ah well.

The sun is struggling through the smog already and Pa will be getting impatient. Time to leave his room.

Start the day.

Toss the cards one more time.


End file.
